Call center improvement strategies that slay sales

Call center improvement strategies that slay sales

So it’s a fresh week and you come bounding in to work, energetically after a great weekend, and determined to carry this enthusiam through the week. Full of inspiration you decide it’s time to shake things up, to FINALLY GET STUFF DONE. Clean sheet of paper in front of you, you’re ready to compile your list of call center improvement strategies, and… er…. Perhaps you’ll find it easier after another coffee?

We’ll make it easy for you. While there are many call center improvement strategies out these, we think these one are among the best. Why? Because these strategies are the sleeper improvements (the ‘ninjas’, if you will); working stealthily behind the scenes, out of sight, to quickly and seamlessly improve call center productivity, while helping you to slay it in terms of sales performance.

Each of these 5 call center improvement strategies offers the chance to save your team time, and can be implemented with little distraction to sales teams and their customers, to deliver a highly efficient call center experience with minimal fuss. Sounds good? Let’s do it.

 

5. Supercharge your calling with a multi-dialer.

Gone are the days of dialling with your fingers. Scanning Excel spreadsheets, losing your place, misdialling… It’s all so 90s. Automated dialers will do it for your agents in a more efficient and targeted way so your sales team can make more calls at one time and reduce downtime between calls. With one of the latest breed of multi-dialers, call centre teams can achieve optimum sales calls made out, delivered in a natural steady rhythm that keeps agents feeling engaged rather than overloaded.

Multi-dialers optimise the number and quality of calls you can make out, using three powerful features:

• Preview dialer: lets agents view the number before you call so you can decide whether to call or not and not waste time on dead leads
• Power dialer: calls multiple numbers all at once and connects agents to the first lead that answers
• Predictive dialer: automatically dials a new number just as an agent finishes another call, sending them naturally to a new call and lead

Together they deliver awesome results to call efficiency in a call centre. By getting dialers to do the dialling, calls are made more often and sales agents can spend more time connecting with their customers and hitting sales targets.

 

4. Cleanse dud leads and invest in fresh lists.

One of the easiest call center improvement strategies involves lead cleasing. Lead cleansing is all about getting rid of those painful disconnected numbers that keep popping up to waste sales agents’ time and ruin their momentum. With a lead cleanser all disconnected numbers are automatically removed from a calling list. This is a really important feature to inspire more confidence in the lists agents are using. Because spending time on disconnected numbers means agents aren’t on live calls making real sales. It also breeds a sense of distrust from agents who may question the quality and value of the lists they’re using. With no disconnected numbers to trip sales agents up everything will run more smoothly and efficiently (and it also means you won’t fall foul of the DNC register).

Investing in fresh lists is another thing you can do to inspire proactive calling from your agents. OK, now this may meet with some resistance, but humour me for a moment. Trying to milk the last out of your sales list is one of the false economies of outbound sales. With dead leads and old lists, sales agents can be waiting a considerable amount of time on calls that won’t get them anywhere. And most agents know this, which can be hugely demotivating to their sales performance.

Fresh lists provide new leads ripe with potential – and there is nothing more inspiring to a sales agent than this.

 

3. Live monitor to optimise sales performance.

By live monitoring agents in real-time you can make changes to call scripting to optimise their sales performance. Live monitoring gives a real-time view of how sales agents and entire teams are going and whether campaign scripts or an agent’s method may need to be adjusted.

By monitoring the effectiveness of call scripting, tweaks can be made to improve performance, giving agents more confidence with the right information, and the ability to adapt while still on a call. This helps keep sales campaigns moving in the right direction, giving agents more relevant information when calling leads, and never getting stuck with tired scripts that simply aren’t working.

 

2. Use the power of real time reporting.

Real time reporting is the cold, hard proof that sales teams are on the right track and hitting their targets – the sort of evidence that is hard to ignore, but easy to take action from as a result. With detailed reporting on queue metrics, from wait times between calls to call abandonment rates and agent activity, you’ll see clearly where improvements in your call center need to be made.

With real time reporting you can track call centre activity 24/7 from any location and shape more effective sales goals based on real time data. This gives flexibility to make real-time tweaks to sales campaigns, come up with new call center improvement strategies to help agent performance, and also plan better for future campaigns.

 

1. And our favourite of these call center improvement strategies: invest in call centre tech.

This really is one of the big call center improvement strategies when it comes to sales efficiency and the challenges of being a contact centre with tech savvy customers and agents that have high user experience expectations.

When you’re using an out-dated system, with clunky hardware and mind-numbingly slow software, this can slow your whole sales team down in a whole range of ways – from the number of calls you can make to the quality of leads being called and having the right and most up-to-date information when talking to a customer.

Cloud-based call centre software will deliver significant improvements in sales efficiency in number of important ways, including:

• low cost, easy to set up with minimal infrastructure costs
• responsive, adaptive and easy to use, coping with real time changes in staff, call volumes and more
• intuitive, flexible, with optimum scalability to handle call-volume fluctuations and reach sales targets
• accessible 24/7 from anywhere, offering staff the chance to work from home
• seamless and integrates with internal CRMs and databases, external payment gateways and other systems

As you can see, these are huge benefits to helping a contact centre operate more efficiently and reach their sales targets.

 

Keep making improvements

There are many more things you can do to improve the sales efficiency of your team, from blending outbound with inbound to maximise call rates to using call centre gamification to get your teams excited about sales targets.

With these call center improvement strategies combined, in a nutshell, more sales can be made. The quality of leads will be better, agents will be more confident and motivated, leads will be more receptive to the way they’re being handled, and you’ll have greater insight to shape more effective sales campaigns in the future. With results like that, you’ll be feeling like you’ve been handed a bunch of (ninja) stars!

Interested in exploring some more call center improvement strategies? Download our comprehensive 35-page ebook on the 14 ways to make more call centre sales without spending more.

Image via Flickr CC/Damien McMahon